Pieter

“The Labyrinth

Zeus himself could not undo the web
of stone closing around me, I have forgotten the men I was before; I follow the hated
path of monotonous walls
that is my destiny. Severe galleries
which curve in secret circles
to the end of the years. Parapets
cracked by the day’s usury.
In the pale dust I have discerned
signs that frighten me. In the concave
evenings the air has carries a roar
toward me, or the echo of a desolate howl.
I know there is an Other in the shadows,
whose fate it is to wear out the long solitudes
which weave and unweave this Hades
and to long for my blood and devour my death.
Each of us seeks the other. If only this were the final day of waiting.

- S.K.”
― Jorge Luis Borges, Selected Poems

“My first ten years were spent in a suburb of Melbourne so quiet that I believed no people could have survived on the far side of their trimmed privet hedges unless their wardrobes and cupboards were stuffed with rubber or clay or painted tokens of another world altogether, a world that poked up into Melbourne in the dark corners of bedrooms and the shadowy spaces under fruit-trees and behind fowl sheds in backyards wholly hidden from the street. On many a Sunday afternoon when my mother took me on long trips by tram to visit some aunt or great-aunt and I had to sit for the first half-hour in the front room, I looked around me for some detail of a painted landscape on the wall or some gesture made by a porcelain figure in the crystal-cabinet or some pattern in the threads of an anti-macassar that seemed the nearest sign of the other world. Then, when I was allowed to go outside , I would always find a certain kind of place - the patch of rotting leaves under the treefern on the blind side of the house; the clump of arum lilies between the garden shed and the back fence; the corner of lawn just beyond the last flagstone in a path that had seemed likely to lead to something much more definite. I would stand in that place and stare, and wonder what word I had to learn the meaning of or what other person I had to turn myself into before I could recognise the doorway that must have been somewhere just in front of me.”
― Gerald Murnane, Landscape with Landscape

“In my father's house there were many mansions and they were all the same, labyrinthian interiors smelling of damp plaster and varnish, the dark hallways narrow, hung with sepia prints of places no one ever visited or would ever dream of visiting - Hong Kong, Abu Simbel, Nasirabad - a seemingly endless bolt of oriental carpet streaming down the stairs and flooding the rooms, its disconcerting flotsam bobbing up in isolated squares of sunlight, all those grimacing flowers, horned faces, toothless mouths flung to the nethermost nook and cranny, lapping here against a broom closet door, pooling there around an umbrella stand, puddling at last beneath a snarl of hair and dust.”
― Kathryn Davis, Hell

“In die wilde en peilloze nachten van de voorlente, bedekt onder reusachtige, nog rauwe en geurloze hemels, die met hun woeste leegten en weidse luchten naar de sterrendoolhoven leidden - nam vader me mee uit eten in een klein tuinrestaurant dat ingesloten tussen de achtermuren van de laatste kleine huizen van het marktplein lag.
In het natte licht van de lantaarns, rinkelend in de zuchten van de wind, staken we het grote gewelfde plein dwars over, eenzaam en terneergedrukt door de enormiteit van de luchtlabyrinten, verloren en gedesoriënteerd in de lege ruimen van de atmosfeer. Vader tilde zijn door flauw schijnsel overgoten gezicht op naar de hemel en keek bitter en bekommerd naar dat sterrenkiezel waarmee de banken tussen de wijd vertakte en uitstromende kolken lagen bezaaid. Hun ontelbare, onregelmatige verdikkingen waren nog niet geordend in constellaties, die oeverloze en dorre uiterwaarden waren nog niet door figuren beteugeld. De triestheid van stellaire leegten drukte op de stad, waar de nacht door licht van lantaarns werd doorweven, die onverschillig hun stralenbundels van knoop tot knoop samenbonden.”
― Bruno Schulz, Le botteghe color cannella. Tutti i racconti, i saggi e i disegni